Is Artificial Intelligence Finally Coming into Its Own?

When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn't looking for a job. A respected inventor who's become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own. It quickly became obvious that such an effort would require nothing less than Google-scale data and computing power. "I could try to give you some access to it," Page told Kurzweil.